It’s not clear to me from your post if you have any specific terminal-like goals in mind. Do you want to just “do research”? Or to teach? Or to “do good”? Or what?
I’m not sure. I’m trying to work towards a career path which uses as much of my ability as I can. The most important job for a professional programmer, was understanding what your client wanted. This is a fine job, but being good at algorithms isn’t necessarily a requirement.
When talking to an engineer at Google, I asked what he thought a good career choice was for working on hard problems. His immediate first thought was graduate school, then he sort of mentioned robotics.
My ideal dream isn’t being a professor, it’s working on something that needs inference, that uses my mathematical abilities. So I’m leaning towards research, but that’s the implication not necessarily the goal.
Teaching isn’t the goal, hands on altruism isn’t the goal. Fitting into a place where I’m using as much of my skill set as possible, is the goal.
And that is a terminal goal, I can do boring stuff in the mean time. My point for jumping out of programming, was exactly that the math wasn’t the important part, it was the picture. The math is important to someone else. I’d like to be that someone else.
I try to explain this to people though, and almost all of them think I’m being way to vague (or they don’t understand). You go to school because that’s the only way you’re going to study the distribution of zeroes for the Wronskian of orthogonal polynomials. I’ve had maybe one professor discourage me from being too picky...
Fitting into a place where I’m using as much of my skill set as possible, is the goal.
This is one of the harder problems out there, in my experience. Many extremely intelligent people spin their wheels on this one for years. Some indefinitely.
Especially for a person who is talented at inferential or analytical problem-solving, looking for acceptable institutions first may be a case of putting the cart before the horse. Those places- the universities, research groups, etc.- tend to be looking for researchers that think of the institution as a tool, not as a goal. This is at least partly because it’s very hard to quantify successful research, and they’re looking for assurances that work will continue. If you value ‘being a member of the Center for Advanced Studies’, then you can succeed at that goal without actually doing any work.
Imagine a dissertation for yourself, the multi-year project that you would be working on during your time in the Platonic University where everyone is accepted and everything is perfect and you study exactly what you want to study. What is that project? What can you do, right now, to pursue that project? What factors will get in your way, and what steps do you need to take to minimize or eliminate those factors? If you can’t picture one just yet, that’s fine. Talk with your professors if you want; not about grades but about what their own research is, and why they care about it. Ask a lot of professors about that; they almost always think that their work is important, and are happy to describe it. Get a sense of the conversation as it currently exists, and then find a niche that interests you.
In other words, don’t look for a pleasant societal position as its own end- just do the thing, become more skilled in thing-doing, and grab help when you need it. The more you do the thing, the more you will quite naturally build a positive reputation among a widening network, and this will grant you access to a surprising number of institutions as you need them. But at the end of the day, it is the privilege of the researcher to encounter a reality that is not built by social consensus. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to break your back accumulating social status markers like grades and test scores just to convince somebody really respectable to tell you what questions to ask.
It’s not clear to me from your post if you have any specific terminal-like goals in mind. Do you want to just “do research”? Or to teach? Or to “do good”? Or what?
My between-the-lines impression of the post was that this is the (subconscious?) lingering question.
I’m not sure. I’m trying to work towards a career path which uses as much of my ability as I can. The most important job for a professional programmer, was understanding what your client wanted. This is a fine job, but being good at algorithms isn’t necessarily a requirement.
When talking to an engineer at Google, I asked what he thought a good career choice was for working on hard problems. His immediate first thought was graduate school, then he sort of mentioned robotics.
My ideal dream isn’t being a professor, it’s working on something that needs inference, that uses my mathematical abilities. So I’m leaning towards research, but that’s the implication not necessarily the goal.
Teaching isn’t the goal, hands on altruism isn’t the goal. Fitting into a place where I’m using as much of my skill set as possible, is the goal.
And that is a terminal goal, I can do boring stuff in the mean time. My point for jumping out of programming, was exactly that the math wasn’t the important part, it was the picture. The math is important to someone else. I’d like to be that someone else.
I try to explain this to people though, and almost all of them think I’m being way to vague (or they don’t understand). You go to school because that’s the only way you’re going to study the distribution of zeroes for the Wronskian of orthogonal polynomials. I’ve had maybe one professor discourage me from being too picky...
This is one of the harder problems out there, in my experience. Many extremely intelligent people spin their wheels on this one for years. Some indefinitely.
Especially for a person who is talented at inferential or analytical problem-solving, looking for acceptable institutions first may be a case of putting the cart before the horse. Those places- the universities, research groups, etc.- tend to be looking for researchers that think of the institution as a tool, not as a goal. This is at least partly because it’s very hard to quantify successful research, and they’re looking for assurances that work will continue. If you value ‘being a member of the Center for Advanced Studies’, then you can succeed at that goal without actually doing any work.
Imagine a dissertation for yourself, the multi-year project that you would be working on during your time in the Platonic University where everyone is accepted and everything is perfect and you study exactly what you want to study. What is that project? What can you do, right now, to pursue that project? What factors will get in your way, and what steps do you need to take to minimize or eliminate those factors? If you can’t picture one just yet, that’s fine. Talk with your professors if you want; not about grades but about what their own research is, and why they care about it. Ask a lot of professors about that; they almost always think that their work is important, and are happy to describe it. Get a sense of the conversation as it currently exists, and then find a niche that interests you.
In other words, don’t look for a pleasant societal position as its own end- just do the thing, become more skilled in thing-doing, and grab help when you need it. The more you do the thing, the more you will quite naturally build a positive reputation among a widening network, and this will grant you access to a surprising number of institutions as you need them. But at the end of the day, it is the privilege of the researcher to encounter a reality that is not built by social consensus. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to break your back accumulating social status markers like grades and test scores just to convince somebody really respectable to tell you what questions to ask.
Seems like a place like this could be a good fit, if you are really really good. Not sure how one gets hired there.